I don’t blame you, nobody else does, either. But its failure would suggest that a turbo four-banger installed in an American muscle car will not be successful.

Everybody around here talks a lot about branding, and a four-cylinder Camaro is a branding mistake from the onset. While there is nothing wrong with four-cylinder turbocharged sporty cars, and while the Camaro has a pretty strong legacy brand, the the idea of one clashes with the brand of the other.

If GM wants to sell a four-cylinder turbocharged sporty coupe, then it needs to give it a different name and make sure that it doesn’t look like a Camaro if they expect to have even half a chance of selling it. The purists won’t want it, the budget buyers wanting fuel economy will buy an entirely different car, and the rental agencies will be indifferent.

If they are worried that $4 fuel is going to kill sales to the point that it won’t sell, then either kill the project or else change the name and the look of it so that this doesn’t become the Half Camaro.

You’re exactly correct, V6 Camaros and Mustangs have always been slow, undesirable ‘girl’s cars’ anyway, they could put the 3cyl from the old Geo Metro in it for all I care

RGS920 :

Barely anybody that wouldn’t get the V8 in the Camaro is going to want a stick anyway

Personally, I think it could work, so long as they keep the weight down and the displacement up.

Great description. But for more details go here.
http://www.mulletsgalore.com/classifications/01/

Manual transmissions in such large performance cars do not go well. Every time you shift, you’ve got all that interia swinging fore and aft. 1000+ more pounds of it then a smaller car. I’ve never used a manual in a large car work, that was “worth it.”

The drivetrain lash/slack in that Turbo Coupe made me hate it, hate it, hate it. It was gone in 12 months. I wish all my mistakes were fixed so easily.

As with VDM (the Honda Odyssey) or MDS (Chrysler’s Hemi) the golden rule: drive lightly and you get good mileage. This applies, of course, to normal cars, but even moreso to variable-displacement systems. This plays out very well in European economy cars.

The problem is that this is a four-thousand-pound sports coupe and not an VW Polo. People will drive it hard, partly because it’s such a pig, and partly because it’s no fun to drive a fasrt car slow. GM might get lucky and, by playing with the ECU, goose the EPA ratings much like they do with the throttle programming and skip-shift on the Corvette. The problem is that, driven the way Camaro drivers are likely to drive, those tricks go right out the window and “real-world” mileage goes with them.

The fact that, on this continent, even Toyota Sienna drivers peel out of intersections should tell you exactly what kind of MPG this car will get.

With the Corvette, this is an issue, but since people spending Corvette money don’t care about mileage, it’s not a big one. The Camaro stands on a lower rung and it will matter more and anyone that buys the blown four will be wondering why they didn’t just buy a six or eight instead.

If GM wants to make a “Secretary’s Car” version to meet both a price point and CAFE, just throw the BAS hybrid powertrain and be done with it. No true, blue Camaro buyer (I have this image of a mullett, silver jumpsuit and mirror shades; must’ve been from growing up near Niagara Falls) is going to buy the four anyway, so we’re talking about a car that exists so that, ahem, image-conscious buyers can afford it.

I can picture the plastic hubcaps now…

35 mpg will be a slam dunk.

Sure, why not? And they should call it the Berlinetta II.

Fine, I’m a traditionalist. A Saabish turbo 6? Maybe. But no blown 4 cylinder. The chassis wasn’t designed for that. It’s just wrong. At least a V6 will give a semblance of low end grunt.

Kids these days…

The traditionalists might rebel – a Camaro with a turbo four sounds wrong, in more ways than one – but by the power numbers, it’s a reasonable alternative to a normally-aspirated V6, and, as Jonny pointed out, it’s not that far off some of the last V8 Camaros. If a turbo four gets better fuel economy than a V6 while making the same power, why not do it?

I have no doubt that JD Power has opportunity for improvement. But their focus is improvement coupled with increased profitability. They could go out and purchase 30 samples of every make and model and do some scientific tests. But then they’d go bankrupt. They charge automakers the privilege of citing their findings in ads and also make money consulting with auto companies to communicate ways to improve their vehicles.

But if their results were completely random and had no link with automakers’ efforts for improvement – they would lose the business of automakers who fail to respect their results. Their motivations may be sourced by money – but the same desire for money pushes them to do the best research they can with their constraints. They created metrics that could show year over year improvement that is quantifiable by their customers. JD Powers doesn’t sell anything to the general public. They sell their wares to automakers.

Automakers are made aware of the underlying ideas behind their IQS and APPEAL studies (primarily because you have to pay money to get a hint at their secret formula). Coke isn’t going to give up its formula to the general public because some people want to know exactly how much high fructose corn syrup that they’re drinking. Like all things, feel free to disagree. But it’s a bit far fetched to assume there is a magical way to measure quality and truth perfectly while utilizing some surveys.

Go figure!

I would buy a Camaro with a turbo-4, if it was the right Camaro. I’m thinking the right Camaro for a turbo-4 would weigh 2600 to 2800 lbs.

The Challenger SRT8 weighs-in at 4154 lbs. The G8 GT displaces 4135 lbs. The new Camaro should tip the scales somewhere between 3750 (best case) and 4000 (more likely) lbs. Not the ideal candidate for a blown four.

I don’t think I’d want a turbo-4 in GM’s current vision of what a Camaro is. But I don’t want that Camaro, anyway, so it’s not a problem.